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Through a historical account of the Pro-Canada/Action Canada Network (PCN/ACN), this dissertation examines coalition formation among social movements. It argues that the complex process of cross-sectoral coalition formation and thus the potential for convergence of social movements can best be understood by combining elements of different analytical frameworks. This dissertation draws on elements of the two dominant paradigms for the study of social movements, resource mobilization theory and new social movement theory. Specifically, it utilizes the formers' attention to the specifics of organization and structure and the latter's focus on the discursive formation of identities. Both are then combined with the uniquely Canadian but theoretically underdeveloped concept of the popular sector and a neo-gramscian perspective on social formation and mobilization that draws on political economy and class-analytical traditions. With its formation in 1988 around opposition to the Canada - U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the PCN/ACN was an early example of a broader trend for trade and investment to become key arenas for social and political contention at the turn of the century. This dissertation challenges the assumptions of most analytical frameworks concerning the limits to coalition formation and argues that the nature of the unifying issue is an important determinant of the potential for the growth and deepening of social alliances. After reviewing the historical conjuncture in which the PCN/ACN emerged, this dissertation traces the history of key sectors and member organizations - labour, women and ecumenical justice - paying specific attention to their approach to political engagement and the issue of free trade. As a result, it establishes the necessary background to understand both the initial basis for unity and the Network's progression beyond a lowest common denominator alliance around a single issue, to a broader mandate. This dissertation provides empirical evidence on which to judge the potential of social movements to displace other discourses and agencies on the left. Given the contemporary interest in the role of social movements, NGOs and civil society, this dissertation provides some essential signposts for two types of practitioners: academics seeking to understand outcomes and activists hoping to determine them.
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Traditional architectural histories of Canada have tended to define the Ukrainian architectural presence only in terms of the sacro-religious or the rustico-picturesque. The more complex reality—that of the community's secularity, urbanity, and proletarianization throughout its history—is demonstrated by a third building type, the chytalnia or reading room, of which a Labour Temple is a socialist/pro-communist variant. These institutions were often found in urban centres where they were frequently located in industrial vernacular houses. Their study therefore confounds conventional notions of Ukrainian piety and rusticity, of a historical geography that consists exclusively of rural Prairie settlement, and of formalist paradigms regarding architectural form. Similarly, the architectural history of Ottawa has been predicated upon monumentality and picturesque settings to the neglect of regional vernacular forms, as well as upon a bilingual/bicultural ethnoculture that negates the polyethnic nature of the city. This study posits the Ottawa Ukrainian Labour Temple as a case study for exploring the limitations of traditional historiography regarding vernacular architecture, Ukrainians in Canada, and industrial vernacular housing in Ottawa.
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In 1923, after nearly three decades of class conflict on the Vancouver waterfront, the Shipping Federation of British Columbia, an umbrella organization of shipping, stevedoring, and warehousing interests, undertook a far-reaching agenda of welfare capitalism. Drawing on wider currents of progressive reform which were cresting in the interwar period, and inspired by the example set by its counterpart in Seattle, the Shipping Federation created new joint political structures, adopted a range of paternalist initiatives, and decasualized the waterfront workplace. From its vantage point, this was a "good citizens" policy, and it was designed to: build bridges across the class divide, gain greater control of the work process, stave off the intervention of unions and the state, and, in the end, mould a more efficient and compliant waterfront workforce. The creation and implementation of this reform agenda, the ways in which white and aboriginal waterfront workers negotiated the politics of paternalism and labour market reform, and the long-term ramifications of this dynamic are at the core of this thesis. -- Welfare capitalism shaped patterns of life and labour on the waterfront significant ways: informal ways of regulating the workplace atrophied; labourism was revived; and some waterfront workers acquired a reasonable standard of living. The trade-off at work, here, was this: only those employees who divested themselves of more radical political sensibilities, and adhered to waterfront employers' broader vision of an efficient, decasualized workplace, could hope to secure a living wage and fulfill their obligations as breadwinners, husbands, and citizens. For aboriginal longshoremen, most of whom were from the Squamish First Nation, this bargain was especially difficult to negotiate for it came freighted with the additional challenges associated with being "Indian" in a white society. Unlike their white counterparts who passed muster, they were marginalized from the waterfront during this time as decasualization's new time-work discipline conflicted with their more traditional sensibilities and ongoing need to work at a variety of tasks to ensure material and cultural survival. -- Straddling labour history, aboriginal history, and the burgeoning literature on law and society, this thesis rejects conventional interpretations of welfare capitalism that conceptualize it as either a failed experiment in industrial democracy, or a drag on the emergence of the welfare state. In doing so, it re-positions welfare capitalism in the context of the wider return to normalcy following the Great War, and the powerful reform impulses that took aim at family, citizen, and nation. Rather than forestalling the welfare state, this citizen-worker complex--which manufactured a new sense of entitlement amongst white waterfront workers--was part of a broader cultural shift that would, after the trials of the Great Depression and challenge posed by the Communist Party of Canada, eventually underwrite the state's very expansion. On a broad level, then, this analysis illustrates how the prevailing liberal-capitalist order was successfully rehabilitated after the Great War and 1919, and how, in the long-term, it successfully contained, by consent and coercion, those forces which were antithetical to the prevailing economic and political status quo.
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In 1933, an American entrepreneur offered the people of St. Lawrence, a small town on the south coast of Newfoundland, the prospect of escaping rampant unemployment and meager public relief by starting a mine to extract the area's vast deposits of fluorspar, which is used in the manufacture of steel, aluminum, and various chemical products. Coming in the context of the Great Depression and the collapse of the fishing industry, the mining industry was eagerly embraced by residents of St. Lawrence and surrounding communities. Several mines were subsequently established, by both the original American company, the St. Lawrence Corporation of Newfoundland, and later by the Aluminum Company of Canada (Alcan). The fragile prosperity that accompanied the industry from the 1930s until closure of the last Alcan mine in 1978, however, exacted a heavy price. Many St. Lawrence workers lost their lives to industrial diseases caused by dust and radiation in the mines. -- This thesis explores the history of industry, labour, and health and safety at the St. Lawrence mines. This study focuses on the struggle by workers and their union for recognition of workplace hazards, improved working conditions, and adequate compensation for industrial disease victims and their families. The thesis argues that, rather than being passive victims of an unavoidable tragedy, workers at St. Lawrence were aware of the adverse health impacts of their work from the very early years of mining, and fought constantly over several decades to have their concerns addressed. Furthermore, the thesis argues that the disaster which ultimately unfolded at St. Lawrence was primarily the result of industry and government authorities ignoring or downplaying legitimate concerns and thereby shirking their moral and legal responsibilities.
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Constitutional reform dominated the Canadian public policy agenda during the 1980s and early portion of the 1990s. As a pressure group operating within a federal system, the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) has been unable and unwilling to confront the issue of constitutional reform. The CLC's confederal structure, combined with its political relationship with the New Democratic Party (NDP), has prevented the CLC from acting as a progressive force for positive constitutional change. Ideological and philosophical differences between the Quebec Federation of Labour and the NDP convinced the CLC to remove itself from the patriation debate in the early 1980s. Labour's short-sighted non-involvement in the process of patriating the Constitution eliminated the possibility of having collective rights enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Subsequently, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the right to strike and bargain collectively were not constitutionally protected. The Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords provided organized labour with a renewed opportunity to promote a pro-union, class-based, constitutional rights discourse, but the CLC's internal cleavages over language, region, and identity, once again, proved too powerfiil a force to overcome. The Canadian labour movement's vision of social justice and economic equality has been obstructed by its unwillingness to adequately confront divisive constitutional issues. However, in an era of rights discourse and neo-liberalism, constitutional reform may provide organized labour with the best opportunity to have its voice heard.
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The period between 1935 and 1945 was a key one for the Communist Party of Canada [CPC or CP] due to the tumult of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Women were key players in the success that the CPC had during this period, one in which Communist and other left-wing movements grew and were more 'respectable' than they were during the Cold War that would follow. Yet women were secondary players in the Communist movement in Vancouver. While CP women played crucial roles in raising money for the Party, setting up fighting organizations such as the Vancouver Housewives league, and supporting the Allied war effort, CP members of both sexes pushed Party women into more traditional 'feminine' roles of wives, mothers, and ornaments. The Vancouver Communist Party offered a substantial challenge to Canada''s liberal state and the CP provided radical women with an outlet to channel their abilities against capitalism. In the end, however, the CP failed to alter substantially the fundamental division of labour between radical men and women. Communists upheld the mainstream doctrine of "separate spheres": they believed that men were workers, labour organizers, and producers while left-wing and working class women were domestic, passive, and consumers. This thesis concludes that while we cannot expect radical organizations to be completely separate from the gender ideals of the period in which they existed, the CPC did little to challenge traditional gender roles.
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While it has been generally understood that domestic service was an institution of particular importance to working-class women and to middle-class householders in North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we still know little about the interwar years, a period during which the occupation declined in overall importance, but still defined many women's working lives. In the 1920s and 1930s, a vast majority of women who grew up in Newfoundland's coastal communities, where household production and the family fishery remained the mainstay of the economy, spent part of their lives performing domestic tasks for pay. To begin to understand the historical and cultural significance of domestic service to women's lives in Newfoundland, this dissenation uses a case-study approach. It focuses on the pulp and paper mill town of Grand Falls, where there was a steady demand for domestics by mill workers and their families, the town's elite, and hotels and boarding houses during the 1920s and 1930s. One of a number of single-resource towns supported by Newfoundland's economic diversification policies of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Grand Falls was built in the interior of the island by the Harmsworth brothers of Britain in 1905. By tracing domestics' lives and experiences from countryside to company town, into the household = as workplace - and then into their married lives, the study explores themes relating to the gendered nature of uneven development. For instance, many Grand Falls employers shared much in common with the women they hired, in terms of religion, ethnicity and social origin., which raises interesting questions about the gender and class dimensions of an employer/employee relationship that has traditionally been characterized as one of domination and subordination. It also considers that relations of gender and class within the company town were formed in conjunction with factors such as migration patterns, pre-existing concepts of the gender division of labour within household production, company paternalism and social stratification within the workplace, the household and the town. The ways in which these factors overlapped and shaped the lives of domestics forms the backdrop of this study.
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Cette thèse traite de l'évolution du mouvement ouvrier montréalais de 1918 à 1929. Nous examinons les diverses organisations ouvrières, tant leur structure et leur composition, que les différentes idéologies qui coexistent dans les groupes ouvriers de la région montréalaise. Après avoir retracé les origines de ces organisations, leur évolution au cours de la Première Guerre mondiale, nous analysons leur développement au cours de la décennie qui suit la fin guerre. Nous cherchons, au delà des présupposés et des généralités, à comprendre le processus d'évolution du mouvement ouvrier montréalais. L'analyse de l'évolution des syndicats et des organisations politiques permet de saisir toute la complexité de rapports sociaux et les difficultés pour les travailleurs d'occuper une place significative. Notre analyse décrit aussi la place des diverses composantes nationales présentes dans le mouvement ouvrier montréalais. Nous insistons sur la place des travailleurs francophones et sur le rôle des travailleurs juifs jusqu'ici méconnu. Nous subdivisons cette tranche historique en trois périodes qui recoupent des conjonctures spécifiques. Les années de l'immédiat après-guerre sont marquées par une très forte agitation ouvrière alors que de très nombreux ouvriers et ouvrières se dotent de syndicats et revendiquent de meilleures conditions de vie et de travail. Le syndicalisme international de métier voit sa prédominance contestée par le syndicalisme canadien et le syndicalisme révolutionnaire. À droite de l'échiquier syndical, le syndicalisme catholique s'installe définitivement au Québec et constitue une des caractéristiques majeures du mouvement ouvrier québécois. L'effervescence ouvrière ne débouche pas sur des organisations politiques fortes malgré l'existence d'un parti ouvrier qui obtient quelques gains électoraux alors que les organisations de gauche doivent se réorganiser, victimes notamment de la répression gouvernementale et patronale. La crise, qui s'enclenche dès le milieu de 1920, affecte considérablement des organisations ouvrières lorsque le capitalisme tient à revenir aux situations qui prévalaient avant la guerre. Les organisations syndicales cherchent à résister à cette stratégie mais le nombre de syndicats décroît. Toutefois, cette baisse du membership syndical ne ramène pas le nombre de syndiqués au niveau de 1913 parce que, parmi les syndicats apparus dans la foulée de la révolte ouvrière, de nombreux syndicats résistent efficacement, dont des syndicats canadiens et des syndicats catholiques. La gauche se réorganise autour du Parti communiste canadien, creusant un fossé entre eux et le reste des militants ouvriers. Le Parti ouvrier du Canada entreprend sa lente marginalisation. Au milieu de la décennie, profitant d'une reprise économique, le mouvement ouvrier se relève. Les syndicats se réorganisent, leur membership augmente et leurs revendications deviennent plus offensives montrant ainsi un regain de militantisme. Mais les divisions s'accentuent dans les rangs syndicaux alors que les syndicats canadiens et catholiques contestent de plus en plus le leadership occupé par les syndicats internationaux de métier. Au plan politique, le Parti communiste occupe pratiquement toute la place, les socio-démocrates se voyant relégués à quelques bastions.
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The following study examines the NDP and the union vote. The NDP and labour unions have been officially linked since the NDP's formation in 1961. Despite the initial optimism of the NDP-labour link, the change from the CCF to the NDP has resulted in limited electoral success, especially at the federal level. The partnership between labour and the NDP has met with limited electoral fortunes. Although their tendency to vote NDP is higher than that of other groups, the vast majority of union members still vote for other parties. Federal election studies have repeatedly shown that 10 percent of non-union members, 20 percent of union members, and 30 percent of NDP affiliated union members vote for the NDP. The question is why do the remaining 70 to 80 percent of union members fail to vote for the NDP. This study aims to address this problem using survey research. The first chapter reviews the link between the NDP and labour and voting determinants in Canada. The second chapter looks at the research design and methodology of this thesis. Chapter three and four examines the results of the statistical analysis. Finally, chapter five summarizes with a discussion and concluding remarks.
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Analysant la mobilité sociale dans le gouvernement de Québec sous le Régime français, ce mémoire aborde la propriété seigneuriale en tant qu'illustration de la promotion sociale dans la vallée du Saint-Laurent au XVIIe et au XVTIIe siècle. Cette analyse, portant sur une soixantaine d'individus aux origines modestes, issus notamment de la paysannerie, ayant accédé à la propriété seigneuriale, se veut une contribution a l'étude de la promotion sociale en Nouvelle-France. Quatre parties constituent l'essentiel de ce mémoire. L'origine de ces individus et les modes d'élévation sociale sont étudiés dans une première servant de cadre contextuel et de présentation sociodémographique. Les trois chapitres suivants visent à répondre plus directement à la problématique de l'étude, à savoir l'impact socio-économique de la propriété seigneuriale chez ces seigneurs aux humbles origines. La durabilité de la propriété seigneuriale, ainsi que le fait d'y résider ou non et le peuplement de la seigneurie sont les éléments étudiés dans le deuxième chapitre. Le troisième chapitre aborde la question du prestige tributaire de la seigneurie, en s'intéressant aux appellations attribuées aux seigneurs, de méme que les fortunes seigneuriales, pour connaître l'incidence économique de la propriété seigneuriale. Dans un dernier temps, le quatrième chapitre met en relief les alliances matrimoniales des familles seigneuriales, également révélatrices du possible impact de la possession d'une seigneurie. Au sein de cette société française d'Ancien Régime, transplantée sur les rives du Saint- Laurent, d'importantes mutations s'opèrent. L'une de ces transformations est perceptible par la plus grande possibilité de mobilité sociale, quasi inexistante en France. Par l'analyse des destins d'hommes dont la naissance ne laissait en rien présager un tel parcours, ce mémoire vise a comprendre l'enjeu de la propriété seigneuriale pour de tels individus ainsi que ses répercussions.
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The Union of Northern Workers, known as the Northwest Territories Public Service Association prior to 1987, is the largest labour union in the Northwest Territories. Northern labour is a little explored field in Canadian history, and as such, this work surveys new ground. Trade unionism in the North's private sector began at the close of the Second World War. The UNW, however, like most public sector unions in Canada, had its roots in the 1960s. This study examines issues pertaining to the union's leadership and staff from 1967, when correctional workers in Yellowknife first organized, until the 1996 convention, when the union took steps to divide into two separate unions in anticipation of the creation of Nunavut in 1999. From its start, the union's geographic jurisdiction distinguished the UNW as unique among Canada's public service unions. It and its predecessor, the NWTPSA represented workers in Canada's most northern reaches. The challenges of life in the North were as real for the union as they were for its members. A relatively small membership spread across such a huge land mass presented obstacles with regards to leadership and service. Also, cultural factors differentiated the organization from others. With an increasing native membership, mostly Inuit, lnuktitut became the union's second language. Distinguishing the union institutionally was its component status within the Public Service Alliance of Canada. The quality of the relationship between these two bodies regularly fluctuated between excellent and belligerent. Similarly, the union's relationship with the Nonhwest Territories Federation of Labour degenerated from founding member to pariah status, in spite of the UNW comprising the overwhelming majority of the Federation's membership. As the union grew from a fly-by-night, seat-of-the-pants organization of less than 100 members at its inception, to over 5,000 when it divided, leadership and staffing gained increasing importance. To meet the challenges of representing northern workers, the union increasingly attempted to professionalize its leadership cadre. The effect of this was an increasing distance between members and leaders which ultimately resulted in the secession of the Nunawt membership.
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The period 1935 to 1947 provides an excellent opportunity to investigate the ways in which the employment and training policies of Canadian welfare state forms delineated the boundaries of gender, race, class and nation in ways that actively constituted (il)legitimate social and economic forms of work, of motherhood, of sexuality and citizenship. Covering attempts starting in the Depression and accelerating during the Second World War into the postwar period, this study tracks the constitution and deployment of government attempts at mapping the female labour supply, of monitoring the activities of women in the labour market, of charting and opening up to scrutiny the conditions of women's labour force attachment: all in an effort to predict and prescribe patterns of women's employment and problems of female unemployment. I approach government reports, studies, commissions and committees as policy events—exercises in governance—as markers for policy analysis which signified important shifts in governmental approaches to the phenomenon of female participation in the formal waged economy. Viewed during the war as a crucial national resource, central to the war effort, women war workers would be cast as a largely ‘unskilled female labour reserve’ by war's end. I examine how ideas about mental testing, intelligence and human capacities—ideas that comprised the foundation of the mental hygiene programme during this period—informed employment and training policies in the formation of the Canadian welfare state for the period 1935–1947. During the Depression, studies of the labour force produced classifications of unemployed women and men. Scrutiny of female employment patterns resulted in the production of categorical knowledges about employability. These practices were further elaborated through the unprecedented research opportunities presented by the war. Suitable vocation, aptitude, and measures of intelligence: these concepts were drawn upon as part of a growing apparatus of employment policy intended to facilitate the smooth transition into the postwar period. I argue that the roster of policies and programmes devised in the name of postwar rehabilitation constituted ideas about female employability which were deeply imbued with the principles of scientific racism and sexism at the core of the mental hygiene program. Vocational planning, counselling and training practices reorganised relations of employment and of unemployment in ways that reflected the managing principles of the risk society. Postwar planning drew upon and constituted new areas of activity for government and community agencies, creating opportunities for the deployment of knowledge-practices such as personnel selection while opening up the interior of the subject as an object of governance, by assessing and calibrating allegedly innate human capacities.
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This thesis examines the effects of the Workers' Educational Association of Toronto (WEA) on social change in Canada between 1917-1945. This study attempts to establish the social importance of this organization in the history of adult education in Canada. The WEA was an educational organization that attempted to provide a link between labour and learning by making educational opportunities available to the working class. The data for this study were obtained from an analysis of the Ontario and Canadian WEA archives. The thesis first examines the history of the WEA and demonstrate its place in the history of adult education in Canada. Secondly, this study suggests that the WEA was the impetus for change in Canada, and in particular for Toronto's working class. The study found that the WEA used a form of critical pedagogy to achieve its goals which brought about social change. This study reinforces the usefulness of critical pedagogy as an approach for adult education when social change is an objective.
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Using Marxist state theory as an analytical framework, this thesis explains the problems faced by the Ontario New Democratic Party government (1990-1995) in implementing a social democratic agenda. Not only was the government constrained in its ability to implement progressive policy, but it was also pushed to implement a Social Contract (involving legislated wage cuts to public sector employees) that alienated the party's base of support, making it more difficult for the party to organize in the future. Although this study relies predominantly on a reinterpretation of existing research on the topic, some primary research is used in the analysis, including interviews with members of the labour movement and former MPPs and analysis of the news media's treatment of the party/ government. Historical and class analytical perspectives are used to explain the evolution of the ONDP's structure and policies, as well as to assess the relative strength of the working class and its ability to support a social democratic political agenda. It was found that the ONDP' s unwillingness to develop a long term plan for social democracy, and its inability to act as a mass party or to build a strong working class movement, made it more difficult for the party to succeed when it formed the government. Moreover, the class nature of the capitalist state, along with pressure exerted by a well mobilized capitalist class, worked to limit the government' s options.
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Relief policy in English Canada in the 1930s was the forerunner of the Canadian welfare state. As practised, the strength of relief lay in local responsibility but this was also a weakness. The aims of relief policy were undermined by the politics of place: the impact of specific historical and spatial circumstances at the local level. Relief policy was not uniformly enforced nor were the outcomes exactly as intended. The objectives, to provide minimal necessities, to exclude individuals and families from relief rolls, to control gender and familial roles, and to impose middle class societal prescription, were not met. Instead, a complex negotiation of responsibilities and expectations was undertaken. Relief recipients, were able to win some concessions. Further, the fragility of social categories used to implement relief policies was crystallized. The conflict between the ideals of policy and people's realities becomes apparent when two very different cities are compared. Using extensive oral history interviews and contemporary relief policy documents and relief department records, this research shows that while the principles of relief were almost identical in Saskatoon and Vancouver, the practice of relief in these two cities revealed the dependency of relief policy upon face to face delivery. Designed to eliminate potential abuse by recipients, the system barely controlled it. Further, local responsibility also ensured that citizens had access to the mechanisms of local politics and tools for change. The local population in Saskatoon was able to win considerable and significant improvements to relief while Vancouver's system remained virtually untouched, in spite of dramatic and revolutionary local activities which reached the national stage.
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The Great Depression of the 1930s was the culmination of severe contradictions building within a maturing capitalist world economy, and has been credited, in conjunction with the Second World War, for structuring the post-war compromise around a national welfare state, full employment, Keynesian fiscal policy, demand management, and the expansion of trade union rights. Despite the importance of this decade in Canadian history, and the highly developed literature on the Roosevelt administration and the American New Deal, few writers have attempted to probe the finer contours of the Great Depression in Canada. This thesis is broadly structured around the threat of social disorder which state officials and social workers perceived to be rooted in the economic malaise of the decade. Attempts to manage the poor through municipal welfare schemes and efforts to regulate the family through newly developed “socialized tribunals” were paired with a campaign to contain juvenile delinquency and structure the leisure time of working-class adolescents. The order that social workers sought to impose on the working-class family and child was materially related to struggles to bring order to the economy. The ideological retreat from laissez-faire capitalism by business and the state coalesced with a burgeoning and militant union movement that propelled the state towards active intervention in the economic, social, moral, and political relations of capital and labor. Pushed in part by an escalation in strike-related violence, the state tentatively embarked on a program of economic control through the Industrial Standards Act, opened legal space for union activities, and attempted to introduce the first minimum wage for male workers. The thesis explores the role of unions, representing both men and women, skilled and unskilled, in structuring the re-organization of capitalism in Toronto's transportation, construction, and service industries, yet draws upon the paradigm of state-centered regulatory regimes which emerged in the state's treatment of the unemployed, the family, and youth. Policies designed to contain 'chiseling' employers, wayward youth, and cheating husbands all faltered because the state was unwilling or incapable of stepping too heavily into the private sphere or interfering with the prerogatives of private property. The resulting half-measures produced a set of contradictions inherent in initiatives designed to accommodate both labor and capital and generated intense struggles against the 'sweatshop,' while bringing the twin issues of the family wage and relief-subsidized competition to the forefront of political and economic mobilization. The largely ineffectual attempts to bring order to political, economic and social life witnessed the emergence of a nascent regulatory state, tied to significant pockets of organized capital, and contingently supported by organized labor. This particular constellation of social forces not only attained a degree of ideological prominence during the depression, but was of profound importance in shaping the second-half of the twentieth century.
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Cette thèse porte sur la carrière du syndicaliste Gustave Francq (1871-1952). Grâce aux nombreux postes d'importance qu'il a occupés dans le mouvement syndical et à la visibilité qu'il a obtenue par la publication d'un journal hebdomadaire durant près de 30 ans, Francq est considéré comme une figure marquante du syndicalisme international au Québec dans la première moitié du )0(e siècle. Personnage polyvalent, il se distingue des autres syndicalistes de son époque, entre autres, par la multiplicité de ses champs d'intérêt: typographe et syndicaliste, il compte aussi à son actif une carrière d'homme d'affaires, de journaliste, de militant politique et de haut fonctionnaire au gouvernement du Québec. La thèse vise à rendre compte du personnage dans sa globalité et sa complexité, c'està-dire en examinant tant sa vie professionnelle que sa vie privée. Pour ce faire, nous abordons sa carrière sous trois angles: l'action syndicale, l'action politique et l'action sociale. Au Québec, il est certes l'un des plus importants défenseurs du syndicalisme de métiers et de la Fédération américaine du travail (FAT). Il prône l'organisation des travailleurs sur la base des syndicats de métiers, reconnaît la légitimité du système capitaliste, favorise les relations harmonieuses entre le Capital et le Travail et témoigne d'une grande confiance dans l'État comme arbitre des relations de travail. À cet égard, il se distancie des positions fondamentales du syndicalisme de métiers, telles que défendues par la FAT. Au début de sa carrière, Francq touche à l'action politique ouvrière. Défendant des positions travaillistes, il dirige le Parti ouvrier de Montréal de 1906 à 1916 et s'oppose systématiquement aux socialistes. Il remet cependant en question son engagement politique entre 1916 et 1921 avec la montée des socialistes au sein du Parti ouvrier et la multiplication des défaites des candidatures ouvrières. 11 se rapproche alors considérablement du Parti libéral avec lequel il a des affinités. Sur le plan social, il mène plusieurs combats depuis le début du siècle pour améliorer les conditions de vie de l'ensemble de la classe ouvrière. Ses principales revendications touchent la réforme du système scolaire québécois, la démocratisation de l'administration municipale montréalaise, la promotion des coopératives de consommation et de production et l'amélioration de la législation des accidents de travail. Au cours de sa carrière, Francq siège donc à diverses commissions gouvernementales comme la Commission fédérale d'appel du travail (1918), la Commission de la charte de la ville de Montréal (1920), la Commission des accidents de travail (1923) et la Commission du salaire minimum des femmes dont il occupe la présidence de 1925 à 1937. Intellectuel du mouvement ouvrier, Francq défend des positions libérales et travaillistes au début du siècle, pour évoluer progressivement vers une position de libéral réformiste au tournant des années 1920. Or si sa conception de l'action politique ouvrière se transforme rapidement au lendemain de la Première Guerre mondiale, il témoigne d'une grande fidélité idéologique tout au long de sa vie à l'égard du syndicalisme de métiers et de son rôle de réformateur social. Croyant à la nécessité et à la possibilité d'améliorer le système socio-économique et les institutions politiques, il est animé de préoccupations sociales majeures axées sur une meilleure répartition de la richesse et un engagement substantiel de l'État dans le champ des politiques sociales. Malgré leur importance numérique, peu d'historiens se sont penchés sur l'étude des syndicats internationaux au Québec, et ce, même si leurs effectifs dépassent largement ceux des syndicats catholiques depuis le début du siècle. S'inscrivant dans le renouvellement des études à caractère biographique, notre thèse vise donc à mettre de l'avant la carrière d'un des principaux dirigeants du syndicalisme international au Québec.
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The goal of this thesis is to question conventional definitions of work through the detailed study of a professional group---specifically rural clergy---whose work falls outside the parameters of accepted definitions of work. According to the feminist literature, work and non-work are differentiated typically by dichotomies which privilege a masculine model of work and devalue women's experience; thus, "real work" is defined as an activity which is paid rather than unpaid, public rather than private, instrumental and intellectual rather than emotional. Professional work definitions also obscure the way in which "work" relies on activities which are linked with the feminine in these dichotomies. Through in-depth qualitative interviews with rural clergy, I explore the extent to which women and men draw on these gendered dichotomies to define work. In some ways, the approach of clergy counters conventional work norms: for them, emotional labour is a priority, work is not limited to a specific time or place, and public and private lives frequently overlap. I demonstrate how clergy define their work in terms of obligation, context, visibility, and time. Furthermore, I also argue that clergy delineate work in terms which still reflect a masculinized work norm specific to their profession. This "clergy masculinized mode" professionalises emotional labour by separating it from the facilitating work of female volunteers; it assumes a worker free from domestic demands in order to fulfil professional obligations within a flexible time frame; and it overlooks how the overlap of the public and private spheres is sustained by the work of wives. Thus, delineating work is particularly problematic for female clergy because professional demands are confounded with demands for adjunct work typically performed by women. My findings (1) highlight alternative markers of work which are suggestive for feminist theory; 2) point to a gap in theorizing about the gendering of work when conventional dichotomies fail to reinforce each other (as in the case of public, yet unpaid, volunteer work); and 3) recognize the possibility that varying masculinities define work.
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The question of the origins of a Metis identity in Canada is one that has been contemplated by several scholars. These scholars have taken various approaches to the question, many focusing solely on the social and political aspects of Metis history. While such approaches can be useful, they ignore the crucial influence of the economic and labour relations of the Rupertsland fur trade in the development and expression of a distinct Metis identity in western Canada. The unique economic and labour relations of the Rupertsland fur trade, identified by H. Clare Pentland as personal labour relationships, allowed a cohesiveness and inter-connectedness to develop between the Aboriginal labourers and their European employers which emphasized the interdependencies inherent in the industry. However, while personal labour relations were an important catalyst for the development and expression of a distinct Metis identity, it is too simplistic to suggest that it was these relations alone that encouraged such a phenomenon. The northern Australian cattle industry utilized similar economic and labour relations and yet a distinct mixed descent identity did not develop in Australia. Therefore, the external influences in the industry must also be examined. The four most important external influences that encouraged the development of a Metis identity in Canada and discouraged a similar event in Australia were: the needs of the colonial employers in regards to land tenure; the economic opportunities available to the people of mixed descent; the educational opportunities available to the people of mixed descent; and, the time depth of contact in both industries. These four external influences combined with the use of personal labour organization in the Rupertsland fur trade encouraged the development and expression of a distinct Metis identity in Canada.
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Medical laboratory technology is the third largest health profession in Canada. Yet, these workers are largely invisible, both to the public and historiographically. Even recent studies of laboratory medicine make only fleeting reference to workers at the bench. This study examines the origins of the laboratory workforce at the Pathological Institute in Halifax in particular, and the Maritime provinces more generally. It utilizes hospital, university and archival records to demonstrate how this workforce was created as part of a "health care team" and the implications this had for the workers themselves. As Canadian hospitals grew in number and bed capacity over the opening decades of the twentieth century, they also grew in complexity. Hospitals added new services, including departments such as dietetics, x-ray and expanded laboratory facilities. As these services matured, the routine work passed from physicians working alone to specially trained workers. Yet, this process was not uniform and remained remarkably incomplete. In the first half of the twentieth century, laboratory workers did not share a common education, training experience, or labour process. Hospital workers in the Maritimes and elsewhere did not necessarily perform discrete tasks and many, notably nurses, assumed duties in the laboratory. The workers themselves had diverse educations and work experiences. Well into the 1950s, the "laboratory worker" was a diffuse concept. The demands of patients and physicians for enhanced services, the constraints of budgets, recruitment and retention problems, and the interests and desires of workers themselves combined to shape laboratory work. Viewed from the laboratory, the story of the twentieth century Canadian hospital is not one of ever-expanding specialization, but rather a complex milieu where the social relations of skill and gender found bold articulation.
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